Movie #: 2247 Title: Arrival 2016

Rating: 7.20

Director (last): Villeneuve (first): Denis

Writer (last): Heisserer (first): Eric

Is this film at all compelling if you don't buy it's central conceit: that it is conceivable that an alien species might experience time differently, and that understanding their language would allow you to have that experience? By "differently", we mean that they experience all events in history at the same time, as if it was a 3 dimensional location that you could look around at, instead of, well, time. Instead of as a linear sequence of events. If you don't buy it-- I didn't-- then there is not very much left that is all that interesting in this story about 12 giant alien pods that land on earth and invite humans to an encounter inside their sparse cavities. There are so many inherent absurdities in the notion that I can't buy in, or suspend my disbelief. (For example, if you knew tha a decision early in life had particular consequences, you could change it, but then you would not know what the consequences were because the decision was never made, so you couldn't change it...) And those early scenes, in which a military commander recruits Louise Banks, a linguist (who gives an unconvincing lecture to students at one point) to join them at a pod in Montana, to enter the space ship and attempt to communicate with the aliens, are clumsy and sophomoric. There is no sense of anything going on behind the encounters, of any other personalities involved anywhere, nor any explanation of why there would not be: did the army seriously believe that Louise would be the only one who could help them, or that, indeed, the real problem had to do with language? Where are the physicists, biologists, engineers? We are then treated to what seems like hours of Louise' heavy breathing inside her suit, which is meant, I suppose, to focus our attention on Louise' emotional response to the aliens. I kept waiting for the military commander, Colonel Weber, to get rid of her because she was clearly incapable of functioning under stressful conditions. The movie wants it that way, though, because makes the character appear modest, demanded, indispensable, so that her resistance becomes heroic. It's Adam's worst work in any film I've seen her in.

Is this movie a "gem"? No

Evil Twin:

Good Twin: Interstellar

 

Added: 2016-11-11 [yyyy-mm-dd]